Blueberry Pancake Sunday Morning

Monday through Friday our morning pace is hurried; shower, coffee, feed the dogs, walk the dogs to work and then Gregory walks them back home before he heads to the office. For eight to nine hours the dogs wait for us to come home and then it's dinner, another walk and off to bed.  On Sunday mornings we don't worry about chores or errands. The longer we sleep in the better. I tend to draw out the morning so that I can listen to This American Life on NPR. One of my favorite delaying techniques is Blueberry Pancakes.  They're only going to buy me a few minutes of the program's ending, but if I time it just right, it's all I need.

The first order of the day is letting the dogs out and feeding them before the program starts. If I'm any later, Baxter's squeaking of his rubber ball tends to interrupt Ira Glass's opening of the program. Like my grandmother, I freeze lots of remnants and finding the blueberries in my overstocked freezer takes a bit of time. Mixing the ingredients from scratch however takes almost no time.  I no longer worry about trying to make buttermilk out of milk and lemon juice.  Who regularly has buttermilk in the fridge anyways? My grandmother would have, but not me.  In a pinch one day I found yogurt makes a thicker pancake, but still light and fluffy.

I'm still getting used to purple potatoes, although they taste great it's a bit hard to get used to at the end of my fork.  Purple food just seems odd for some reason. (Yes, I know antioxidants.)  To prevent purple stained pancakes, I spread 1/4 cup of batter on the heated griddle to test it. Quickly dotting the batter with a dozen blueberries, my pancakes end up dotted rather than streaked. Timing of the flip and final plating vary greatly depending on the topic of the show. I've flipped them early and I've flipped them late. When I get it exactly right I'm ecstatic. Anything that fails to meet my standards goes to the dogs.

After the show's finale, the dogs gather around me. I let each dog take just one bite.  In close quarters it's always good to teach the dogs to share and be patient around one another. Everybody will get their due, in turn. And I'll serve another round if there's enough. Every once in a while there's a bit of bacon. When I say a bit, I really mean it. At least with my delivery method of one small bit after another, I can be sure the dogs really enjoy it.

People laugh when I tell them there's a blueberry pancake recipe in my book.  Share it with your best friend and your family on a casual Sunday morning and you'll know why.

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